Wells Fargo Sends Crew To Foreclose On Home That Doesn’t Even Have A Mortgage, Shrugs

There isn’t really a great way to make it up to homeowners that don’t even hold a mortgage when you’ve sent a crew to break into their house and take everything out of it, but we suppose “sorry” is an okay, if lackluster, start. A California couple says Wells Fargo made a huge mistake by trying to take their home and now they’re not being very helpful in getting the family’s belongings back to them.

Alvin built the home with his father when he was a teenager, reports CBS Los Angeles, and has a lifetime of memories invested in the house. Not to mention all of his family’s possessions, many of which are lost or broken after a crew hired by Wells Fargo broke in and took everything away. They shouldn’t have done that, as the home doesn’t even have a mortgage. It was all a big mistake, says the bank.

A spokesman for the bank released a statement apologizing, saying:

“We are deeply sorry for the very personal losses the [redacted] family suffered as a result of their home being mistakenly secured and entered by a contractor hired to address a different nearby property. We moved quickly and have been in contact with the Tjosaas family to resolve this unfortunate situation and right this wrong.”

That’s not really enough for Alvin and his wife, he says, but they’re trying to move on despite the upheaval in their lives.

“When you put your heart into something…it makes me real sad. I’m just glad I have my sweetheart. We’ve been together a long time,” he said.

Sending a notice of foreclosure to the wrong home? Sure, that could happen. But actively hiring a crew to go to the entirely wrong address and break into the home is a new level of horrible.

Some months ago I sent them a very UNhappy Americian Airlines story (along the lines of “24 hours of airport H*ll”) and they didn’t print that one, either. I still can’t believe it. Whole groups of passengers were tossed off three different planes in a row trying to get across the country to San Francisco. Total travel time was about 26 hours. So we’re even! Just sayin’…

I read an article about the unemployment rate that says it shrank to 8.1%
because the workforce shrank, we have the lowest workforce participation since September 1981, and 96,000 jobs were added as 368,000 people left the workforce.

This needs to stop. There has to be some way for them to put a procedure in place to check, recheck, and double check that they have the right address, the right house and the right people. AND MAKE THEM FOLLOW THAT PROCEDURE, with stiff penalties if they don’t. Otherwise, it’s just legalized burglary!

Well, what’s the difference in criminality between one or more street thugs breaking into your home and stealing your stuff and one or more bank-employed persons breaking into your home and stealing your stuff?

The fact that in this case, it isn’t street thugs doing the crime, shouldn’t make it any less of a crime.

In many states, burglary is a strict liability offense. It simply does not matter if you believed you had the right to break in if you actually didn’t.

The lack of intent usually reduces the severity of the crime, but it remains a crime.

Does that suck for a crew that is handed the wrong address? Sure. But the person who handed them the wrong address is also going to prison. Criminal conspiracies are like that. it adds a truly amazing incentive to make sure you send the crew to the right address.

And by not enforcing the existing laws, all you end up ensuring is that banks have no incentive to correct their flawed procedures.

Try to take my stuff, find yourself on the wrong end of a shotgun. Hire a crew to remove all my stuff while I’m at work? Find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit if I don’t have everything back in its original condition within 48 hours, placed where it was. There still may be a shotgun involved.

Shotgun? May be? In several states, that’s a certainty, except if may be an AK-47 or something else. And it may get fired first, before the questions are asked. And the response from the cops might be “sorry, we don’t clean carpets”.

There has to be a reasonable threat. Breaking down the door and entering without permission is a reasonable threat, even if the claim is “we just want to evict you”. You have no way of verifying that if they are breaking down the doors.

Shooting them in the back while they tried to leave would be a case for criminal prosecution.

Personally, they should require a uniformed officer of the law, sheriff or whatever, to accompany the crew and monitor them.

That way there is a reliable witness to speak to the owners to make the proceedings go smoother and/or stop the proceedings if the homeowner raises reasonable objections.

I’ve heard far more stories of police than agents of banks breaking into the wrong homes, either going to the wrong address or having a bad address on the warrant. If the police are accompanying bank representatives when they hit the wrong house, you now have an armed home invasion taking place, and the cops are almost never held accountable for this kind of thing. And if you do manage to shoot one of the cops or bank contractors, you’ll end up dead or in jail. So it seems to me that requiring cops to accompany these guys might just make the problem worse rather than better.

“So it seems to me that requiring cops to accompany these guys might just make the problem worse rather than better.”

Except that if the cops are involved, it’s less likely they’ll go to the wrong house. After all, judges are not known for issuing “robo-warrants,” and when serving warrants, police tend to be careful to get these kinds of details right. Not saying it never goes wrong, but it’s a lot rarer than banks seizing the wrong homes.

I think you might find otherwise if you researched it further; there are many accounts of wrong-door raids by police than you might think. And you may also find that judges have been found to have “rubber stamped” the warrants when these things do happen.

In the case of a police raid at the wrong house, not only is there potenial liability, but there’s a good chance it tips off the people who the cops really wanted, so there is an additional consequence.

I agree. Banks can make record profits to the point that settlements for scenarios like this are a drop in the bucket to their bottom line. They won’t put measures in place to ensure this doesn’t happen until they have to bail out their executives from jail.

If we want to pretend that corporations are people, the government should be able to seize the property of the bank that was used in the commission of the crime of breaking and entering and theft, and the executives who oversee foreclosure procedures are the cogs in that machine.

“Then send whoever forged the paperwork, whoever failed to verify the paperwork, and whoever carries out the illegal order without verifying it’s legit to prison.”

Ooooo…this sentence triggered a thought in my head. What if the person who is supposed to verify the paperwork, along with a bank officer, were required to accompany the eviction crew, with the caveat that the people inside might possibly be armed and within their rights to shoot to kill if the bank is in the wrong.

I don’t know if it should just be the clerk, but as Lyn Torden writes, all of them that are involved in the checks and balances.
An example: my mom is refinancing a loan with that wonderful bank known as bank of america (yeah, I know, but it started when it was countrywide). Anyway, they ask for various pieces of documentation; one of which is a letter that explains why my mom’s address is listed as ‘nn 100 Street’. Her real address is xx-nn 100 Street and somewhere along the line somebody somewhere entered her address and missed the first 2 digits of the house number. As they didn’t tell us where they saw the info, I don’t know who to inform about the boo-boo. We just have to write up a letter and send it to B of A explaining the mix-up. So, maybe, this type of mix-up caused this or other ‘burglaries’?

No. The penalty should be it MUST come from the CEO’s paycheck. 100% garnishment until it is paid off, so in this case, probably 30 minutes of his/her time taken. But I’d bet then the CEOs would get their act together.

A CEO is the corporation, embodied. They are ultimately responsible for everything the corporation does, good and bad. It is the duty of the CEO to ensure the corporation obeys the law. It is likewise the responsibility of the CEO to stand trial if the CEO can’t be bothered to do that.

This is why they are paid so much. Because they risk so much. Or so the theory goes. In practice, the CEO will never be held personally liable for criminal corporate behavior, so they have no incentive to run a clean business.

This is CRIMINAL behavior, and banks do it anytime they want. If any normal person did what the bank did it would be a felony and they would be in prison for years. But because it was done by agents of a bank, it is not illegal, and the bank will suffer no consequences. If the police complain the bank will “apologize” via a few fat envelopes delivered to the right cops. The local DA would get paid off as well if it tried to investigate. It never ceases to amaze me that corporations can perform criminal activity and get away with it. Bribery and corruption are so widespread.

Where do you get this drivel? This is clearly a civil case and not a criminal case. Am I condoning what Wells Fargo did or the sloppy procedures that caused it? Absolutely not, but it still is a civil matter. Should there be very substantial damages paid to the homeowners? Absolutely. Should there be procedures in place to avoid what happened here? Absolutely.

But to conclude from this that the bank will suffer no consequences and that the police and District Attorney would get paid off is pure nonsense.

Where is the criminal intent? Entering the home under the circumstances described here does not show criminal intent. Mere entry itself does not mean a crime has been committed. The entry must be accompanied by criminal intent. Check out criminal intent to see what is required (see Burglary).

Maybe, but what were they supposed to do with the things they took and what did they really do with them? If they were supposed to deliver them somewhere and they took all the good stuff for themselves, that’s criminal intent right there.

Intent is a legal term that has meaning a bit different than you would expect. It’s not that you intended to do the harm that was caused, it’s that you intended to do the act. Example, I throw a ball at your face, causing you injury. Intent is established by the fact that I intended to throw the ball, not to cause you injury.

It’s the same situation that car reposessors go into: if you repossess a car on a legitimate order, it’s perfectly legal. If you repossess the wrong car, it’s grand theft. I would have simply called the police, reported a breaking and entering and had them arrested immediately for cleaning out my house. The bank can right the wrongs through the legal system, the contractors would likely receive no penalty because the paperwork was incorrect, but they would sit in jail until the bank confirmed that. I would then sue the bank for conversion in civil court and push punitive damages.

You are completely wrong. Their intentions are MOOT. They are guilty of breaking and entering, grand larceny, destruction of property…this is not a civil action, this was a bank BREAKING THE LAW. Doesn’t matter if they screwed up.

“Mens rea is traditionally divided into four separate categories: general intent, specific intent, recklessness and criminal negligence.” That quote is from the page you linked. I think (IMO) they would definately meet criminal negligence (they did have to break into the place after all) and maybe recklessness.

The criminal intent is breaking into the home. The bank shopuld have provided working keys to a door for them to enter the property. A professional crew should have stopped and called the bank to find out what the problem was. BY your definintion I should be able to stop and any house, kick in the door and use the restroom with there being no crime committed since I didn’t intend to do anything else.

By your logic any robber could theoretically avoid criminal charges/jail time by simply paying off their victims. DUI and hit someone? Broke their leg? It’s not assault by vehicle or negligence – it’s just a $50,000 check.

If you want to steal all my possessions (those that aren’t irreplaceable are probably estimated at a grand total of 15k with depreciation considered), and those that are irreplaceable like newspaper clippings, yearbooks, photos, and an old coffee mug that means a lot to me, that sucks big time.
But if you want to do it, and then give me a quarter of a million dollars, go ahead. Do it.

Did the bank knowingly send them to the wrong house? It’s not like someone at the bank got up and said that they needed a bunch of stuff from that house and hired a crew to clean it out and bring it over to his house.

They made a mistake. They should definitely pay for the mistake in a big way but it is not criminal. Is every car accident vehicular assault? No.

It is rare, but it is exactly what this article describes, except with 250k instead. I was using an example to illustrate what donjumpsuit was suggesting, that a payoff negates a crime. It does happen, and it may help in hiding it, but ultimately the crime was still committed.

Oh, I know, it’s just so unlikely that I don’t think it’s worth considering. I should point out that I consider crime by a corporation different than crime by an individual (i.e., one tends to have enormous cash reserves and therefore would be barely scratched by pecuniary damages). The crimes are the same, but the punishments should be severely different.

Look, I am with you guys. I want the big banks to pay, and this is a violation that is a direct result of them being unforgiving about missed payments, or the refusal to negotiate the terms of a current mortgage and just forcibly evict. If it was me I would be screaming bloody murder that some big bank just came over and stole all my stuff.

Then after lawyering up, they offered me a quarter million. Yea, time to shut up and enjoy purchasing all new furniture and appliances.

Does it sucks some heirlooms are gone. Yes, but I guess everyone different. Maybe this family had a shrine in their home dedicated to their late fathers uniform, and now that it’s gone, they are on the doorstep of death. Or more likely, the uniform sat in a box waiting to be passed onto a grandchild, without too much interaction on a day to day basis.

In my life, nothing is irreplaceable. It’s just life man, get over it.

I am not a lawyer, but I doubt taxes need to be payed on a lawsuit that compensates for a loss. They could claim that they lost 260k worth of possessions and were justly compensated, thereby balancing it at zero on a tax return.
Again, this isn’t a financial gain. It is a good question though, I wonder if people have to pay taxes on a wrongful death suit, or injury, or etc.

Actual damages aren’t considered income as they’re an award by the court to cover an actual loss. However, I bet a punitive damage award would be considered AOI (any other income) on your income taxes.

A WWI uniform? Worn by a close family member? That’s irreplaceable. You’re talking about a nearly hundred year old museum artifact with a family connection. There’s literally no amount of money that could compensate for that.

“…his family’s possessions, many of which are lost or broken after a crew hired by Wells Fargo broke in and took everything away.”

What? You lost my Picasso that was painted on the back of a copy of the Declaration of Independence and framed with pieces of the True Cross? I reckon you boys need to run on back to the bank and hunt me up a whole heapin’ mess of zeros and a 1.

If you do some research, you’ll find plenty of examples of police committing “wrong door raids”–and when that happens, people have been killed. And many, many dogs. Police are almost never held accountable for this kind of behavior (Google “Cheye Calvo”), so your proposed solution might well make the problem worse.

This is B&E plain and simple. The owners should have filed a police report and if the police/DA did not follow up with charges against the bank and/or the contractors who fucked up then we know they are being paid off.

How many average people avoid jail time for crimes with the “woops, my bad” defense??

This article should be shoved in the face of every genius who thinks the way to “economic recovery” is to reduce the regulations that banks have to comply with. Based on this it is pretty obvious that we need a law that makes this a criminal offense. The only way to get the proper attention on this is to put people in jail for criminal negligence and/or breaking and entering.

Quite. The obvious conclusion here is that corporations don’t deserve any special treatment. Despite the whining of social conservatives and robber baron wannabes, corporations need law and order as much as people do.

Enforce the rules we have. Certainly don’t scale them back. The mortgage companies especially have proven themselves untrustworthy. They should be treated like felons in lock down rather than being given a free pass. They need to earn the reinstatement of priveleges.

You have to threaten these companies and provide case law cites just for them to do their legal duty and file paperwork properly.

Seriously?? What regulations? There is a 0% chance of anyone serving jail time for this incident. The problem is their lawyers put arguments that the breaking and entering that occurred isn’t criminal. We need specific regulations to criminalize that activity. The judges will just tell you that they are “following the law”.

That “enforcing regulations already in place with punishments that actually hurt” statement would require new regulation to apply harsher penalties.

Regulations exist to support existing big business. The more there are, the better supported they are.

When you reduce regulations you enable other players to enter the market, which helps the consumer, and hurts existing big industry.

Big business clamours for regulations to bolster themselves, and the worst part of the sick system is they have convinced most that regulations exist to “keep them in line” and “stop bad things from happening”, when the truth is they’re there to support monopolies and make the entrance fees higher.

Did you know WalMart lobbied hard to get Minimum Wage in the US raised? I bet you didn’t. Why would they do that? Because before the increase, WalMart paid more than minimum wage, and the new minimum wage was the bottom wage they paid. Raising Minimum Wage didn’t hurt them, it helped them–it made mom and pop stores, who paid the old minimum wage, lose employees they couldn’t afford to and end up out of business.

Walmart’s ability to destroy local businesses is greatly exaggerated. If anything WalMart helps local businesses by keeping people close to home rather than allowing them (and their money) to flee to the nearest large city.

I would press charges. I would sue. I would hire the most expensive lawyer I could find and be like, go to fucking town on this bank. They broke so many laws by what they did – an apology is no where NEAR enough. Not to mention the precedent they set with these actions.

Personal property was destroyed and trespassing occurred because of their negligence in formulating and implementing a corporate policy which prevented illegal acts. That’s aiding and abetting by (some legal term I don’t remember at the moment).

Make him (or her) go through the whole process — thrown into a cell with anybody and everybody rounded up lately and have them sit there 48 hours before they can get bail set.

If that happened a few times, I’m sure the whole banking industry would shift gears very quickly.

Two words for these homeowners: Criminal charges. Go to the police and demand there be an investigation and criminal charges, starting with the crew that broke in and stole everything, and move it right on up the line to whoever it is as Hells Cargo that cut the orders to do so, and so on, and so on. Call local TV and newspapers, get them involved. Make ALL the noise you possibly can. That’s the only way you’re going to get justice from these bloody bastards.

Now imagine if the homeowners shot and killed one of the foreclosure crew for B&E. Well Fargo has really screwed up here and needs to fix this for the homeowner and revise processes so this never happens again.

I must confess that I am quite disturbed by some of the comments here. Let’s think this through objectively, shall we?

What this situation boils down to, as I understand it (and someone correct me if I am wrong), is a simple clerical error. Someone, somewhere, transposed a couple of numbers on the address line of the work order to execute the eviction. The work crew that carried out said order (likely an independent contractor) had no way of knowing they were at the wrong house, they were simply doing what they were hired to do.

I see no criminal intent here, nor do I see any criminal conduct, either. The was no malice, no rich fatcat with his fingers steepled and laughing maniacally as his company destroyed an innocent homeowner’s life. What I see is a tragic mistake that any one of us could have been involved in under the right (or wrong) set of circumstances. Yes, even you and me.

Let’s begin with the work crew. A bunch of mopes earning ten bucks an hour hired to do a simple job: carry stuff out to a dumpster. They weren’t paid to think, they were paid to work. They had absolutely no way of knowing they were in the wrong house. Even if the crew leader called in to the front office to confirm the address, that would have done nothing because the original order was wrong as well. Even if the sheriff had been there to oversee the eviction, they, too would have been under the impression that it was a legal foreclosure. Even if someone had the presence of mind to say aloud “Hey, this house still looks occupied”, remember that a lot of foreclosures are squatted, so it would be reasonable for the crew to assume such.

Commentors are calling for the jailing (or God forbid, death by homeowner) of anyone and everyone under the sun involved with this situation. The crew, the clerk, hell, even the CEO who had nothing to do with the order. Put yourself in their shoes. These are the same average, working-class Americans JUST LIKE YOU, swept up in a horrible mistake. That’s all. A simple mistake.

What can be done now? The bank seems to be doing what it can by making it right within the scope of its power. A quarter mil payout is a good start. A personal apology from the CEO would be nice, if it hasn’t already been made. They recognized the screwup and are doing right by the homeowner. The bank does NOT have the power to bring back the heirlooms that were destroyed. The work crew did have an opportunity to do its part by making a beeline to the dump where the possessions were taken, and start digging. I wouldn’t put it past the crew workers to snitch some of those items for themselves; if that’s the case, they can do right by returning what they can. It’s reasonable to assume the clerk who kicked the numbers is out of a job at this point.

Granted, it is a mistake that could have been prevented. Safeguards were ignored or simply not in place. A legal remedy can be made so that a mistake like this does not happen in the future.

The way I see it, the comments here are a lash of frustration out at the big bad banks for screwing over the country and sinking us into this recession. Fair enough, I get it. But a dose of logic shows that this is not the case here.

The CEO is the one who deserves jailing. He is responsible for his employees conduct that is directly related to the business. ie: He isn’t responsible for one of them selling illegal drugs at work, because that’s against company policy.

However, he is directly responsible for hiring an incompetent clerk. Incompetence is how we get clerical errors. Either that or other job issues (Long hours, high stress, not treating employees like humans, etc). You, as the CEO, are responsible for those errors.

At the same time, because there isn’t a direct intent, the CEO should be dealt with lightly, a few days in prison would do the job, along with the permanent criminal record. The CEO will be out of jail and paying FULL ATTENTION to the business after that.

Do we jail the driver of a car if he falls asleep at the wheel and runs over someone? Yes. We just don’t jail him for murder–we jail him for manslaughter.

The original CBS Los Angeles article is uninformative and poor journalism.

When did this happen? Why didn’t the family find out until after it happened? There’s a reference to the home being the family’s “desert oasis,” implying that it;s a vacation home, but the article never actually says that.

Who is the contractor? What was the nature of the mistake?

And why isn’t it possible to trace and restore at least some of the family’s possessions? Even if they were sold, Well’s Fargo couldn’t give good title.

Its actually pretty clear. Wells Fargo is apologizing for their error. Unfortunately your own questions seem irrelevant. They had their possessions stolen by Wells Fargo end of story. If you want answers you are going to have to call Wells Fargo. Good luck with that.

Things like this make my blood boil – some of those lost possessions have absolutely no monetary value – but have immense sentimental value to the family. I prop0ose that the President – not some lackey have his house impounded by the police, his family tossed out, and the Tjosaas family allowed to remove anything they want from his home – no matter the sentimental OR monetary value. As that is exactly what was done to this family by the organization that CEO is supposed to be in charge of.

I’m sorry from a peon at the bank designated to ‘fix it’ is not sufficient to ‘fix’ anything. Something needs to be done at the top to inconvenience the head man or why should he care about this kind of thing? Bank CEOs have repeatedly shown the normal people of this country that they really don’t care about us only about the money they take in that pays their insane bonus.

It is really only a matter of time before this bucket of FAIL plays out where the property owner is home, is armed, and decides he’s protected by whatever castle/stand your ground/make my day law his state of residence has on the books. Body bags will be involved…

From what’s written in the later article (http://www.knssradio.com/pages/14189500.php), it doesn’t seem like MBQ’s summary is accurate. Wells Fargo gave the correct address to the cleanout crew, but whatever mapping software/service they used sent them to the wrong place. A second cleanout crew had the same problem finding the address.

The address WFB provided was clearly correct since the sheriff was able to direct them to the correct home using it.

WFB is still responsible (which they admit), but I don’t see how the hatred on this thread is warranted (and the last sentence of the summary is flat out wrong.)

The clean-out crew is performing an action that is perfectly legal when performed on the correct home, and breaking and entering (and possibly burglary) if performed on the wrong house. “Castle” laws on the books in many states would immunize a property owner from prosecution for actions taken to protect their property in such cases.

It’s in everyone’s best interests to double and triple-check these things…